Troy Dennison's Blog, page 3

Checking In – looking back with Alec #2 in a limited series

Almost a year ago an ambitious independent film project was screened for the first time to an enthusiastic audience. Checking In has gone on to be featured in film festivals across the world and won Best British Film at the London Film Awards 2014. The movie is now available on VOD for the first time and in celebration of its continued success we’re going to be visiting some of the cast and reflecting upon the film in a series of special blogs.

In this second in a series of interviews we have the irrepressible Roger David Francis.

Can you tell us a little bit about your character in Checking In?

A character is certainly how I would describe the part of Alec the Hotel Manager. As the Big Boss, man in charge Alec is always on his toes. When it comes to customers, Alec is the Basil Fawlty of the 21st century. At home, he watches countless episodes of retro, time forgotten sci-fi and fantasises of the day his dedicated employee, Radka played by Nici Preston will be his date. At work his calm demeanour is tested to the limits as he ensures weddings are handled with attention and kept free from prostitutes running wild in the hotel.

What aspects of your character did you enjoy portraying most?

For me I think allowing the rather manic Alec to show his caring, softer side towards Radka his loyal employee was really endearing. The scenes towards the end of the film are so sweet. Alec for a few brief moments tries to ask Radka out. It’s obvious despite his customer service skills he is still inexperienced and very shy when it comes to dating.

What sort of preparation did you have to do for this role?

Preparation is key to success. Winging it on a prayer is also a great way to create fountains of inspiration. Improvisation often brings an exciting new dimension to a script and creates a wonderland beyond the writers’ original comprehension. Personally I believe a script should be likened to a corridor with many doors. As the actor delivers his lines along the corridor, he should open a door and give something of himself to that moment. One of those door-opening moments was Alec destroying a classic line from Macbeth. Whilst not in the original script the line sets the scene up and ensures Alec receives a well deserved bashing for his unwise performance.

What was it like working in a real life hotel?

I have a personal fondness for the Checking In location. Having left college after completing a two-year City and Guilds Hotel and Catering qualification, the Barons Court Hotel was my first real job. In fact, I worked for just under six years in all the various departments from Kitchen to Front of House. Playing Alec however, was the best promotion I had received from the hotel, even if it was 20 years later.

What type of movie do you enjoy watching and why?

Oddly enough, I am not unlike my character with regard movie choices. I love sci-fi. I adore movies that leave me perplexed, and wondering what happened to the last two hours of my life. I have watched the Matrix so many times I have become convinced I have taken the blue pill myself. There is a vast sky exceeding into the infinite realms of endless conscience that I never tire of exploring.

What was the most challenging aspect of the production for you?

Unlike many of the other actors who had their scripts months in advance, my role was presented to me by an act of fate. The original actor could not fulfil her commitment to the role so I was asked if I would like to step in. There is nothing I love more than a challenge. I have had tiny parts in productions such as Hollyoaks and Doctors, however, nothing on this scale. Trying to learn so many lines in a very short space of time was an incredible test of memory. I remember being in the Green Room at Emerdale and practicing the script with a bunch of very excited extras. The big question; would I do it all over again? The answer is a resounding YES. An actor learns so much from every role they perform and I am no exception. Checking In will be an experience I will remember fondly for the rest of my life. I cannot close, without thanking the crew for the endless amount of cheese cobs provided and hope to be eating them again sometime in the future.

Click the image below to see the film’s trailer –

Checking in is now currently available on VOD at the following sites –

Vimeo Link (click image)

VHX Link (click image)

Check back soon for another interview with the cast of Checking In.

Checking In – looking back with Radka #1 in a limited series

Almost a year ago an ambitious independent film project was screened for the first time to an enthusiastic audience. Checking In has gone on to be featured in film festivals across the world and won Best British Film at the London Film Awards 2014. The movie is now available on VOD for the first time and in celebration of its continued success we’re going to be visiting some of the cast and reflecting upon the film in a series of special blogs.

To start the ball rolling I’ve been talking to Nici Preston who played the maid Radka.

Can you tell us a little bit about your character in Checking In?

Radka is kind and thoughtful and very hard working. She is moral and has everybody clocked; she likes observe people.

What aspects of your character did you enjoy portraying most?

I enjoyed learning the accent that was fun, and building up her character and her relationship with Alec which is quite funny!

What sort of preparation did you have to do for this role?

To prepare for the role I kind of saw the humour in her and her easy going nature and I liked her. I also had some voice coaching from someone Russian!

What was it like working in a real life hotel?

It was fun acting in the hotel and the staff were so fab and generous.

What type of movie do you enjoy watching and why?

I like lots of films (especially quite art house) in many genres including horror!

What was the most challenging aspect of the production for you?

The most challenging part of the production; trying not too eat too much of the yummy food, cheese cobs and samosas…

Click the image below to see the film’s trailer –

Checking in is now currently available on VOD at the following sites –

Vimeo Link (click image)

VHX Link (click image)

Check back soon for another interview with the cast of Checking In.

VHX Link Click image)

Spookiness

A strange thing happened to me last night.

I was in the middle of watching “Super Troopers” (don’t judge me, it was a funny film) and I popped to the loo. I was heading back from the bathroom when I saw something that completely and utterly unnerved me. Just before my living room door is a small landing and as I approached it I saw the hind quarters and tail of a jet black dog disappearing into the wall.�� I stopped in my tracks and blinked a few times. I knew exactly what I had just seen but in all seriousness I found it difficult to believe my own eyes.

Now to put this in context, despite the sort of stories I write and the films I have been involved in I am highly sceptical when it comes to the supernatural and the unexplained. But the thing that really freaked me out is that my dog Theo (a big blonde Lab) has stood growling and snarling at that exact spot on the wall more than one – each time it totally freaks me out because it’s so out of character for him.

Was it a ghost? Some sort of phantom apparition? A harbinger of some kind?

I don’t have an answer. All I am certain of is that I saw what I saw, and I have no answer as to what it was.

Second Hand Heaven

I love books. I’ve loved them since I was a little kid, and I used to be a voracious reader. I would hit the library several times a week and by the time I was twelve I was lugging around a copy of Tolkien everywhere with me. As much as I liked lending books though I really liked to own them for myself. Over the years I’ve built up rather a large collection. Some books were purchased from bookshops and some from mail order companies, and some I even picked up from libraries when they soldl off their stock. My all time favourite places to pick up books though were second hand book stores, and by association market/car boot stalls.

I remember hitting a church fayre on the Isle of Arran when I was ten and walking out the happy owner of some battered Doc Savage novels (I still have them on my shelf now). I remember checking out stalls in Borth and Twywyn and shops in Aberystwyth and Llanedloes. I picked up some Discworld novels for cheap in Telford one day on a shopping trip, and I’ve snagged more books from charity shops than I can remember. And that was how I’ve always been; keeping an eye out for the second hand books, the bargains, giving something someone else has read a new home. My secret hope as a writer is to actually see something I’ve written on the shelf in a charity shop some day – weird I know, but true.

The point of my slight ramble is this; there’s a huge car boot sale near me every Bank Holiday Monday (like today) and over the years I’ve enjoyed having a good mooch to see if there was a bargain to pick up. Last Bank Holiday though I had something of a surprise. There were NO second hand book stalls. Oh sure, there were stalls that had second hand books, but none devoted entirely to books. All you’d see were the occasional half dozen titles that everybody’s owned and wants to get rid of. In fact the only book stall was one selling dodgy ebooks!

It was something of a surprise to me that gradually made me sad the more I thought about it. Did it have some sort of greater significance? Does this mean that print as we know it is slowly dying out? Or maybe it’s just that nobody could be bothered lugging all those heavy boxes of books around only to get them wet (an innevitable fact of British Bank Holiday’s is that the weather tends to be bloody awful!). I really don’t have an answer, but I do know that I somehow felt at a loss, unfulfiled at not being able to sift through countless volumes to find a well-thumbed bargain to take home. I’m going to try again today, and I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that this time, perhaps there’s going to be a bargain book bazaar.

Check out “Checking In”

Checking In is a British independent film made by a collective of Midlands based production companies.�� The film is an anthology, featuring five interlinking stories set in a hotel across a twenty four hour period. Made for a budget of a little over ��2000 and fuelled by cheese cobs and enthusiasm the cast and crew have produced something rather special – five very different stories that have a wide ranging appeal.

“Great cinematography���superb acting���make a reservation to see this film soon. You will not be disappointed!��� – Midlands Movies

The film delves into a wide range of characters and themes, from a comedic look at rowing couple Ted & Mary (Ernest Vernon & Suzanne Kendal-Morgan), a singer looking for inspiration (Michelle Rachel-Cox), a pair of cos-players examining their place in society (Laura Evenson & Christopher Smart), an Asian wedding with a bride on the run (Reynah Oppal & Phil Stanley), while the final segment looks at a one night stand between Pete & Aaron, who meet up for an initial night of fun, but it turns into something they could never have imagined, revealing secrets they never thought they’d share (Conner McKenzy & Tony Gibbons).

The Trailer

Checking In has been called “unpretentious, stark and heart-warming”, is receiving positive reviews and has been featured on UK radio and�� TV. The team have been referred to as “some of the world’s most innovative and talented contemporary film makers”.

“Remarkable! Unique! Outstanding!” – London Film Awards

After playing at festivals across the world Checking In was the winner of Best British Film at the London Film Awards 2014. Following a series of local screenings the film will now be released on VOD through various outlets. A blu-ray and DVD release is also anticipated and several of the cast and crew gathered recently to record an audio commentary for the film.

Vimeo VOD Link

VHX Link

Official Website – www.checkinginmovie.co.uk

Official Facebook – www.facebook.com/CheckingInMovieUKwww.facebook.com/CheckingInMovieUKwww.facebook.com/CheckingInMovieUK

Far too quiet for far too long

Once upon a tim… ah, wait… let me start again…

A long time ago in a galaxy far… wait, sorry… I’ve heard that one before too…

Sometimes life just gets in the way. There you are minding your own business, blogging away about the things you do and the things that interest you and suddenly – BOOM!

Gone.

Done.

No more words. And no matter how hard you try or what you do there just seems to be no way to find the spark you’ve lost. It’s a shame, but there it is. Call it “writer’s block” if you will, but I just call it a bloody frustrating annoyance. It’s one of those things that comes out of nowhere and just leaves you high and dry. In my case the ideas were there but the words just would not come. No matter how hard I tried it just didn’t seem to work. I don’t suppose losing an entire chapter of a novel to a dodgy hard drive helped either!

So I tried and stopped and tried and stopped again. About all I’ve managed to produce of late is an incredible sense of annoyance at myself. The soft sound of the wind and the occasional chirp of crickets is all that has inhabited this blog for far too long. I think I may have even seen a tumbleweed go tumbling by…

Yet here we are, with me putting down words that maybe someone somewhere will read. There’s nothing profound here, no great message of earth shattering importance. It’s just me, pressing a few keys and making words appear.

But isn’t that exactly as it should be?

The Ballad of Walter White

Be warned, there are spoilers ahead for the series finally.

I came to Breaking Bad late in the game. I knew about the show, but I wasn’t really that interested. That was until the amazing Koneko-Chan started to tell me about the show. Her enthusiasm for it got me intrigued and so I watched the pilot episode. Then I watched episode two and by the third I was completely hooked. I waded through the entire run in the space of two weeks and caught up in time to watch the explosive finale.

The success of the show is in equal parts down to the quality of the writing and the fantastic actors involved. I knew Vince Gilligan’s name from back in the good old days of Mulder and Scully and of course Bryan Cranston from Malcolm in the Middle. And the show never failed to deliver, there was always something happening and none of the episodes felt like filler. It delivered time after time in surprising ways.

Of course a lot of that success falls squarely on Walter White. An average man, plagued by a life where he never felt he got a break. The cancer that propels a mild mannered chemistry teacher down the path of darkness that Walt treads is just another example of life not giving him a chance to really succeed.

His main motivation for all the terrible things that follow is a simple one that anyone can understand; wanting to see that his family is provided for when Walt is gone. Of course this backfires spectacularly over the course of the next five seasons. Right up to the very end though, Walt tries to ensure that his family won’t suffer because of him. Skylar bears a lot of the burden of Walt’s mistakes, and the guilt of what she has become a part of is a heavy one. Walt manages to make sure she is no longer implicated in his crimes, however she still carries the weight of knowing that Walt did it all for her and their children.

There is a telling moment during Walt’s last meeting with Skylar after he has made sure his son will received the remains of his ill gotten gains. Walt knows his family is provided for but he still has one last thing to do before he ensures their future safety; he has to give his wife absolution from the guilt of his crimes.

“I did it for me,” Walt says. “I liked it. I was good at it…and I was really….I was alive.”

The reviews I have seen all view this as Walt finally admitting that he enjoyed being Heisenberg. I don’t see it that way though, I regard it as Walt finally giving Skylar what she needs. Her relief, gratitude, and even love when Walt takes full responsibility for his actions is heartbreaking. It serves its purpose; Skylar no longer needs to feel the guilt of Walt’s actions. It is another step on his path to ensuring that his family will be okay when he is dead. Of course he follows up with the total obliteration of the Nazis, the only other real threat to his family.

Walter White leaves this life with a clean slate for his family and his original goal achieved. It has cost him everything; friends, self-respect, the love of his family and ultimately his own life. He has the blood of a lot of people, both good and bad on his hands. Walter White is no hero, he is ultimately a man who has been frustrated his whole life and is driven by circumstances to commit evil acts for what he feels are a good reason. Walt proves undeniably that he would do anything for his family, and in that way is he any different to you or me?

I’m going to miss Breaking Bad, which I guess is why I have already started to re-visit Walt’s misadventures from the start.

F#@k, F#@k, F#@kity F#@k!

Let’s talk about swearing.

I have no problem with swearing. I swear, I swear a lot. But just like everything else, wearing a suit, juggling, smoking, and the tiny three pronged fork you get in fancy restaurants (which may be for eating your salad, but we’re all too embarrassed to admit that we’re not quite sure) there is a time and a place for it. I would never dream of swearing in front of my dad; and the harshest words I have ever uttered in front of him are bloody and crap. But I do swear, and I use swear words in my stories where I feel it is appropriate.

Now to the point of this little ramble; last night I watched The Sweeney. Not the classic TV series, but the new re-envisioned movie starring Ray Winstone. Now first off, it’s not a bad film and it rattles along at a tidy pace. But it is grim and rather unrelenting and could have been a whole lot better than the end result. The one thing that jumped out at me though was the use of profanity in the film. Like I said, I don’t mind swearing, but this was taking it to an extreme. If regular, everyday swearing is like skydiving then this was skydiving naked, with a napkin for a parachute, while juggling tigers. It was excessive, it was too much.

It seemed as if every other sentence was peppered with profanity and it came in a steady stream like machine gun fire. Perhaps it was an effort to make the film dialogue more “real” or more “urban” but all it really did was make me cringe. I know people really do swear that much; heck I was walking behind some the other day who couldn’t get through a single sentence without using the word fuck, but I really don’t need it in my movies. Why couldn’t they have dumped half the swearing and added some pithy one-liners? It would certainly have improved the final film. I don’t need to hear a character punctuating their dialogue with fuck, shit and cunt to know that they’re meant to be a serious hard-ass.  An example?:

“Have you got big bollocks? Have you? You got big fucking nuts? Lets have a look at them.”

Contextually it was fine for the character and situation to utter the line, but honestly it was excessive. All The Sweeney managed to do was desensitise me and leave me less sympathetic to the characters. The flip side of this particular coin is Luc Besson’s The Family, which also contains swearing. However in this case the word fuck is used inventively, sparingly and makes a great punchline when uttered by Robert DeNiro. There is a world of difference between the two films, and I wish the writers would recognise that adding a shitload of swearing to a screenplay does not in any way make it a better piece of work.

In closing? I swear, and have used profanities in this article, but that doesn’t mean I want or need to have my ears assault by a cacophony of dirty words whenever I watch a movie. Give me great dialogue, entertain me, and be sparing with the swearing!

 

 

PS

The amount of time the auto-correct has tried to force me to change a word it deems incorrectly spelled in this article is ridiculous. I’m British, I write in English, so please, please dear spell-checker stop trying to make me spell like an American!

 

And the Stars Went Out – Brand New Short Story

I watched the stars fall from the sky.

Thin fingers of light traced their fiery path across the heavens. The night air was warm as it cocooned me, holding me in its intimate embrace as I watched the cosmic fireworks. The burning ribbons of light fell in silence, somehow eerie and comforting at the same time. It was an ethereal lightshow of the grandest nature and I was the solitary witness to the glory.

The cool breeze that blew in from the ocean tugged at my clothes and hair as I lay on the beach. It soothed my bare skin like a balm, as relaxing in its was as the soft sound of the breaking waves. The rhythmic flow of the breakers was the only sound in the night. If I turned my head I could make out the lines of foam as the waves peaked, lit by the orange glow of the moon. It looked like lines of flame, rolling across the water, reaching for the shore.

The sand beneath me was dry and fine, pleasant to the touch as I traced my fingers through it. Once I left this place I knew that the burning lines of the waves would roll up the beach, eradicating every trace that I had been here. There would be nothing left, no sign, and no reminder that a living person had ever touched this shore. That was fitting in a way that was far too metaphysical for me to grasp. I would leave the pondering of it to other, better minds if there were anyone else left. Instead I would just stay here a while, lost in myself as I watched the sky.

I breath in deeply, tasting the oceans salt on my tongue. It reminds me of tears, as if the world is weeping for me. Perhaps it is, and the sadness of the thought tugs at my heart. I will lie here a little longer and watch the sky before I leave this place. I will enjoy the terrible beauty of the heavens, as one by one the stars go out forever.

 ****

Here’s a little piece of free fiction to get you going on this Bank Holiday weekend. It was partly inspired by watching a meteor shower with my son – a truly amazing sight. I hope you enjoyed reading it.

This story is dedicated to the wonderful Koneko-Chan, who always makes me smile when she talks about space.

Daily Doodle #30 Tarzan

And here it is – the thirtieth Daily Doodle! I actually didn’t think I’d manage to complete this personal little daily challenge but here we are, even if I did have to juggle sometimes around my writing schedule. I hope you enjoyed this little foray into artistic endevour, and if you stick around I’m sure I’ll be scribbling some more in the near future now that I’m properly motivated again.

Today’s doodle was actually meant to be Admiral Ackbar from Jedi, so I have no idea how I came to do my favourite tree swinging literary character instead!